


jealousy

by worstgirl



Category: Newsies!: the Musical - Fierstein/Menken
Genre: F/M, I wrote this in like an hour, M/M, Pining, also sorry if they’re a bit ooc, both davey and crutchie like jack, implied canon-typical homophobia, it was a vague request from my friend, jackatherine is canon, they just said they wanted davey n crutchie pining over jack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-06
Updated: 2019-12-06
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:27:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21693811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/worstgirl/pseuds/worstgirl
Summary: “Do you, y’know, despise me?”“Do I— what?”“Despise. Like, hate. Dislike.”“I know what despise means, Dave.”~~~mutual pining, but not over each other.
Relationships: Crutchie & David Jacobs, Crutchie & Jack Kelly, Crutchie/Jack Kelly (one-sided), David Jacobs & Jack Kelly, David Jacobs/Jack Kelly (one-sided), Jack Kelly/Katherine Plumber
Comments: 17
Kudos: 48





	jealousy

Returning from the Refuge, Crutchie knew that nothing would be the same with him, but he didn’t realize just how different everything else was. When he’d been, in a sense, liberated, the only thing on his mind had been Jack, only for him to find Jack positively glowing with pride. 

Jack had always been the kind of person to take control. Maybe not in the sense that most people did, but he was a charmer, a natural-born leader— although, maybe it was less natural than due to his upbringing. Whatever the case, Jack was a leader, but he had a tendency to go off the rails if not kept on the right path. He thought with his heart, not his head, diving into things with barely a thought other than justice. Crutchie had always been his guiding light, he knew that. He kept him from overworking, doing dumb things that caused more trouble than they were worth, from saying the wrong things to the wrong people. 

He returned from the Refuge, bruised and sickly and tired, to find himself seemingly replaced. 

David Jacobs, the new kid with the little brother, was acting like he’d known Jack for years. He wasn’t the one who ripped up his own shirt to bandage Jack when he’d had a run-in with the Delancey brothers at the age of thirteen. He wasn’t the one who listened to Jack’s dreams of Santa Fe in the wee hours of the morning while staring out at the foggy city skyline. He wasn’t the one who held Jack close when he had dreams they didn’t talk about once the morning bell rang and they went on their way, taking to the streets like fish to water. He wasn’t the one who’d stuck by Jack’s side for years, ever since they were children. 

And yet, there he was, looking just as scruffy as any of the Manhattan boys, sitting next to Jack as he pointed at a piece of paper on the other’s lap. He was letting him look at his drawings. Not even Crutchie was allowed to look at those, usually. 

Crutchie forced down the little twinge of something in his gut. Jack was like a brother to him. Nothing more, nothing less. 

He tried not to feel like he’d been replaced when Katherine Pulitzer swept in, all bright skirts and shining eyes and sharp wit, to visit Jack. He was used to being another one of the guys, but between Katherine, and Davey, and Les, and all the others, Crutchie barely talked to him. He couldn’t get up into Jack’s penthouse in the sky, most days. His leg had been busted worse in the Refuge, leaving him in more pain than ever. 

“Do you, y’know, despise me or something?” Davey asked one day, leaning against a brick wall in an alleyway to get away from the sun beating down on them. 

Crutchie looked up, blinking at him. “Do I— what?” He didn’t think he despised anyone, if he was being entirely honest. Sure, Snyder had been, if anything, a righteous asshole. And Pulitzer was essentially the devil. But he considered the guys his family. It wasn’t like half of them had a biological family to rely on, anyways. 

“Despise. Like, hate. Dislike.” Davey listed, pulling off his hat, wiping at his forehead. 

“I know what despise means, Dave.” Crutchie hated that, everyone thinking he wasn’t smart. No gimp leg would ever make him less intelligent than any of the other guys selling papes. But he knew Davey didn’t mean it that way— he sometimes had a habit of underestimating the newsies vocabulary, due to their lack of proper grammar. “Why d’you think I hate you?” 

“You give me this look sometimes. Like I did something to hurt you.” Davey, for once, didn’t look as cool and calm and mature as he usually did. Crutchie was hit with the realization that for all his learned ways and talk of the right way to construct a union, he was barely older than him. He was just a kid. They were all just kids. And Davey happened to be a slightly more mature kid, sure, but that didn’t mean anything in the long run. 

“You didn’t do nothin’.” Crutchie said, leaning against the wall, stretching out his leg and wincing. Walking around all day didn’t help matters. “I just look, sometimes. It don’t mean anything, you know.”

Davey looked skeptical. “If I do anything to upset you or… or anything—“

“Believe me, I’d tell ya. Or Jack—“ For some reason, the word clogged in his throat. Jack, who barely seemed to pay attention to whether or not Crutchie was upset, all caught up in his political cartoons and Jewish scholar boys and pretty journalist girls.

“Oh.” 

That single syllable seemed to carry the weight of the world, and they’d brought the World down nearly three months ago. 

“Oh?” Crutchie repeated, more prompting than anything else. 

“You too, huh?” Davey’s smile seemed almost bitter. 

Crutchie felt his stomach turn. Did Davey know? God, he’d kept it under wraps for so long, and Jack had Katherine now, and even then he had his art, and his dreams, and Santa Fe. He didn’t need this, this odd jump in Crutchie’s chest, this super-fast beat of his heart, the tingle in his stomach when he smiled, on top of all that. “What’s that s’posed to mean?” 

Davey turned wide eyes on him, looking like a startled deer. He opened his mouth, closed it, took another breath. Apparently, the Walking Mouth wasn’t feeling too mouthy. “Nothing.” He finally said, his voice sounding odd. He peeled himself off the wall— most of the guys moved fluidly, and Jack in particular seemed to move like he was so full of energy and purpose. Davey, on the other hand, had a tendency to look like a gangly baby deer when trying to do something interesting. Crutchie didn’t look like much of anything when he moved, other than a cripple. 

“C’mon, if we get moving, we might be able to sell out in time to not burn to death.” Davey said, and Crutchie, after grabbing his crutch, hobbled after him, other hand gripping his messenger bag. 

They didn’t mention it again, that conversation on the corner by the barbershop. But if Crutchie sometimes shot a sympathetic look across the lodging house when Specs came to deliver a message from a certain journalist, and Davey occasionally made a point to sell on the same street as him out of some odd sort of solidarity, neither of them said a word.


End file.
